Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: Iconic Musicians on our New Biographies Shelves

Herbie Hancock: Possibilities by Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey

Blues All Day Long: the Jimmy Rogers Story by Wayne Everett Goins

Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones by Paul Trynka

Herbie Hancock: Possibilities by Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey:

The legendary jazz musician and composer reflects on his seven decades in music, tracing his early years as a musical prodigy and work in Miles Davis' second quintet to his multi-genre explorations and collaborations with fellow artists.

Blues All Day Long: the Jimmy Rogers Story by Wayne Everett Goins:

A member of Muddy Waters' legendary late 1940s-1950s band, Jimmy Rogers pioneered a blues guitar style that made him one of the most revered sidemen of all time. Rogers also had a significant if star-crossed career as a singer and solo artist for Chess Records, releasing the classic singles "That's All Right" and "Walking By Myself" as well as high profile tours with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. In Blues All Day Long, Goins mines seventy-five hours of interviews with Rogers' family, collaborators, and peers to follow a life spent in the blues.

Bowie the Biography by Wendy Leigh:

David Bowie, the iconic superstar of rock, fashion, art, design, and the quintessential sexual liberator, is a living legend. However, for the past five decades, he has managed to retain his Hollywood star mystique. Now author Wendy Leigh reveals the real man behind the mythology. Through scores of interviews with Bowie’s lovers (both male and female), his girlfriends, business associates, groupies, and band members, Leigh, who grew up just a mile from where Bowie was born and went to school, has written an intimate biography of rock’s greatest enigma.

Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones by Paul Trynka:

Brian Jones was the golden boy of the Rolling Stones, the visionary who gave the band its name and its sound. Yet he was a haunted man, and much of his brief time with the band, before his death in 1969 at the infamous age of twenty-seven, was volatile and tragic. Some of the details of how Jones was dethroned are well known, but the full story of his downfall is still largely untold. With more than 120 new interviews, Trynka offers countless new revelations and sets straight the tall tales that have long marred Jones’s legacy.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

Iconic Musicians on our New Biographies Shelves

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